RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you want an example of the official “conspiracy of silence” that has allegedly allowed hundreds of vulnerable white girls in some towns to be abused by Asian men, the case of Ajmal Mohammed, a 43-year-old from Blackburn, might seem to be it. In 2004, Mohammed, an amateur cricketer in the Ribblesdale league, took a schoolgirl to a Manchester hotel room and got her drunk – to celebrate, he said, her 14th birthday. The child ran away. Police were called, but he denied having sex with her and they issued him with a “child abduction warning letter”. He was never prosecuted.

Two years later, Mohammed took another 14-year-old to a hotel room, this time in Blackpool – and this time he raped her. When the police came for him, they found the numbers of six other vulnerable youngsters on his mobile phone.

In industrial towns across the North and the Midlands, over the past three years, at least 51 people have been convicted in trials involving groups of men who have picked up young girls for sexual exploitation. Forty-eight of the offenders were Asian; the vast majority of the victims were white. Last week, in Derby, nine men, eight of them Asian, were sentenced for their parts in a gang that groomed, sexually exploited and in some cases raped 27 local children, 22 of them white.

The issue exploded on to the national agenda on Friday after Jack Straw, the former Home Secretary who is also MP for Blackburn, said that in his town, some Pakistani men saw white girls as “easy meat”. There was, he said, “a specific problem of Pakistani-heritage men who target vulnerable young white girls, and we need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani-heritage men thinking it’s OK to target white girls in this way”.